Overview

This document does some initial exploration of the FAA flight delay data. Starting now with 2015 Airline Service Quality Performance (ASQP) data.

Variables in 2015 data

The data frame has 971,365 rows and 55 columns.

Overview of 2015 ASQP data. For factor variables, most frequent value is shown.
Variables	Class	N_unique	Min_numeric	Max_numeric	Top_factor
ï..ID	integer	971365	1	4877622
YEAR	integer	1	2015	2015
QUARTER	integer	3	1	4
MONTH	integer	3	1	10
DAY_OF_MONTH	integer	31	1	31
DAY_OF_WEEK	factor	7			5
FLIGHT_DATE	Date	93
UNIQUE_CARRIER	factor	14			WN
AIRLINE_ID	factor	14			19393
CARRIER	factor	14			WN
TAIL_NUM	factor	4731
FLIGHT_NUM	factor	6499			469
ORIGIN	factor	316			ATL
ORIGIN_CITY_NAME	factor	312			Chicago, IL
ORIGIN_STATE	factor	53			TX
ORIGIN_STATE_FIPS	integer	53	1	78
ORIGIN_STATE_NAME	factor	53			Texas
ORIGIN_WAC	integer	53	1	93
DEST	factor	316			ATL
DEST_CITY_NAME	factor	312			Chicago, IL
DEST_STATE	factor	53			TX
DEST_STATE_FIPS	integer	53	1	78
DEST_STATE_NAME	factor	53			Texas
DEST_WAC	integer	53	1	93
CRS_DEP_TIME_HR	integer	24	0	23
CRS_DEP_TIME_MIN	integer	60	0	59
DEP_TIME_HR	factor	26			17
DEP_TIME_MIN	factor	61			55
DEP_DELAY	factor	791			-3
DEP_DELAY_MINS	factor	747			0
DEP_DELAY_15	factor	3			0
DEP_DELAY_GRPS	factor	16			-1
DEP_TIME_BLK	factor	19			0600-0659
TAXI_OUT	factor	160			12
WHEELS_OFF	factor	1426			NULL
WHEELS_ON	factor	1441			NULL
TAXI_IN	factor	156			4
CRS_ARR_TIME_HR	integer	24	0	23
CRS_ARR_TIME_MIN	integer	60	0	59
ARR_TIME_HR	factor	26			16
ARR_TIME_MIN	factor	61			40
ARR_DELAY	factor	817			-8
ARR_DELAY_MINS	factor	740			0
ARR_DELAY_15	factor	3			0
ARR_DELAY_GRPS	factor	16			-1
ARR_TIME_BLK	factor	19			1600-1659
CANCELLED	integer	2	0	1
CANCELLATION_CODE	factor	5
DIVERTED	integer	2	0	1
CRS_ELAPSED_TIME	integer	480	22	718
ACTUAL_ELAPSED_TIME	numeric	658	1	658
AIR_TIME	numeric	635	1	635
FLIGHTS	integer	1	1	1
DISTANCE	integer	1297	31	4983
DISTANCE_GRP	integer	11	1	11

Questions (for us to answer after reading the ASQP documentation):

Additional data needs:

Simple table of lat / long for each airport
Time zone for departure and arrival airports. We will want this so that we can do our own calculations of time differences; we can generate this given lat longs of each airport if needed.

Not all carriers have data for every month; only AA has data in August, and US and F9 (Frontier) are missing October data. (Airline codes here)

The number of flights per month is similar for most carriers, except AA, with a much larger count of flights in October 2015.